I didn’t really feel up to writing much today, especially about today, but I feel much better now and can almost laugh about it. There’s so much to carry around in your head sometimes, and it’s always the most depressing that tend to keep rising to the focus of the inner eye of the mind.
As I walked into my father’s house, I found him in the middle of cleaning up the kitchen. He had, he explained, wanted to bake for me a frozen coconut-custard pie because he knew it was my favorite, and my sister had just brought him several Mrs. Smith’s. He hadn’t read the directions (printed on the bottom with no mention on the top or sides) which stated that it goes directly from the freezer to a preheated oven set at 425 degrees. He’d let it thaw on a refrigerator shelf. When he took it out to bake it, it was of course liquid in a raw pie shell in a flimsy tin pieplate and soft cardboard box. I found the box and empty pie shell in the sink, drained the soggy mess to throw away and washed the sink as he still swept tiny bits of coconut off the wooden kitchen floor.
It frightens him as well as me and we try to tell ourselves that this could happen to just about anyone, just as he couldn’t understand the new fuse box for the washer and dryer to replace the screw-type fuses that an electrician put in last week and told my father not to shut off just as my sister did twice more since as well. Per her suggestion, I black-lettered ON and OFF on white strips taped to the switches, and in the middle of my second warning not to shut them off, he does. This is my father, clever, curious and self-taught correctly in just about anything mechanical. We look directly in each other’s eyes as we talk and never say it. But the fear of the Alzheimer’s that we lived through with my mother is always there as a terrifying thought.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology